If you took a small sip of the kool aid you would then be aware that the recent Mac mini hardware refresh (specifically the upgrade to the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M) has been thoughtfully positioned for the future. At $599 US it's the cheapest retail entry fee into the cult. With OpenCL coming this fall alongside Snow Leopard, and this recent article about the 9400M, I think these lil' Core 2 Duo boxes will be doing some heavy lifting.

Mmmm. Kool Aid.

Tim

$600 Kool Aid? Wow, that's the cheapest one out there? Hmm.

I tend to buy parts and put them in my own box. This dual-core Atom setup cost me less than $250 for everything (the Ubuntu OS was free)...

Compiz is great

Intel Core 2 Duo T6400 -- 2.0 GHz
4 GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 3650 -- 512 MB -- 1280x800 resolution

I'm kinda disappointed that it's an ATI card, and not a nvidia card, but it was a good laptop for $700, and it handles everything I've thrown at it anyway, with just a bit of slow-down on playing video and rotating the cube...

I'm just disappointed that my bluetooth dongle doesn't work with Ubuntu 9.04

I have been doing a lot of playing lately, this is fedora x64. I installed Centos 5.3 and Fedora 11. Centos was by far more stable, but many more features worked out the shoot with fedora. Centos 5.3 is KDE 3.5 and Fedora is KDE4 and I wanted to play around with KDE4 so I am now using Fedora. I would probably recommend fedora 10 unless you know what your doing. I prefer these over Ubuntu or Debian based systems.

I just have Kubuntu Jaunty and it's nice on my lappy. I love Linux as well. I wish I could replace Windows with it, but...program compatibility...you know...

But, I love my N810 with Maemo LINUX on it. I'm not much into Apple at all. Never liked them. I won't bash them (anymore than I already have to my friends, family and co-workers), but I just don't like them. Interface for Mac OS X is nice and that's about the only thing I like about it, the Eye Candy.

Jesse~

I been using vmware server on top of Linux, since its free. So I just use my windows xp vm when I need windows. My laptop came with Vista - Core2 Duo 2.4 and 3GB ram (Lenovo T61)

It runs awesome under Linux, and windows xp also runs good too. I gave it 1GB ram and things are working great. Which means most days when work is done, I shutdown windows XP and I have 3GB ram available for linux again, Thank you vmware....

Yeah, VMWare is good and I've used it before, but of course, it probably is much better since I last used it. I'd use Linux on my PC, but I don't want to ruin the XP install I have going on at the moment. I will when I get a new, separate hard drive for it. I have my 500GB external, but it's only for storage (I use WAY too much disk space).

When I have the chance to actually try it out on this hardware beast (since my laptop is nowhere near good enough to run XP via VMWare due to it's crappy chipset, CPU, RAM and graphics card), I'll try to see if the online games I play work on it. Last time, they didn't. Maybe this time they will...and hopefully so will The Sims 3. I love that game! *-*

Jesse~

Well all you have to do is use the conversion tool to convert your windows XP into a virtual machine. The tool to do this is also free from vmware

I initially did this, I used the vmware converter to make a copy of my running windows system onto my USB hard drive. I installed Linux on my USB 500GB Disk and booted in on my laptop to linux, leaving my internal laptop disk untouched. (Note I removed my internal hard drive during linux install on the USB drive, I didn't want grub on it)

This allows me to boot from my internal drive as normal, or from USB from the bios boot menu.

Anyway, so then you can boot to Linux and install vmware and run your current setup virtually and see how it runs, if it goes well, you can switch over.


All that said, I really don't know about gameplay, its not anything I have actually tried. I have been playing openarena with my kids

OpenArena is fun. I remember playing that one night while I was drunk (won't go into details), but I did A LOT better at it drunk than I did sober. Ain't that sad!? lol

I know about how to setup VMWare and all, but I want to be absolutely sure that my MMO's that I play will be playable because last time I tried them, they were NEAR playability, but they were just on the edge...how saddening...

Anyway, I'm still enjoying Linux on my laptop and have been doing so. I remember my first time using Ubuntu was Hoary Hedgehog and my very first time using Linux was an OLD Pogo Linux distro someone gave me to try out on an old 700Mhz Celeron HP that was "semi-new" at the time.

Pogo hated my hardware and it was using the CLI-installer. Hoary hated some of my hardware on the PC I used and later on, hardware support become to much better, but of course, I retried Ubuntu a year after that.

Now, I've been more or less keeping up with it and like I said in my introduction (Newbies Thread in General), I've been using Ubuntu off an on since I rediscovered Ubuntu with the release of Dapper Drake, completely missing Breezy Badger. Although, from what I read, I didn't miss much since I read that Breezy had quite a few problems like Jaunty has now with Intel Graphics Chips, like my current situation with my laptop being a Intel GMA...

One day, when I am sure that my favorite MMO's and my favorite games have "better compatibility" within Linux (either with VMWare, WINE or VirtualBox), I'll be sure to make the complete switch and leave Windows as nothing more than a distant memory...until I start programming. Then I'll use Windows to make me money and Linux to make and support good software.

Jesse~